The present invention relates generally to wireless communications devices, and in particular, to a wireless communications device that requests network data from proximal devices prior to making the request over a wide area network.
A wireless communications device has an interface to communicate with other devices over the air. Exemplary wireless communications devices include cellular phones, personal digital assistants, pagers and computers. These communications devices allow subscribers to communicate with others even if they are away from their home or office. Moreover, the communications devices include hardware and software components to provide subscribers with data from the Internet. By virtue of an Internet connection, subscribers may download information such as news, stock trends, or weather and traffic reports.
Presently, the growth in the use of wireless communications devices has tremendously increased wireless traffic. The projected use of wireless devices to access information from the Internet will increase wireless traffic even more. The present and projected use of wireless traffic threatens to overload existing wireless, wide area systems and increase response time to users.
Internet caching is a known method for reducing traffic and increasing response time over an Internet network. One Internet caching scheme used in wired networks seeks to reduce response time by storing the most frequently requested data on network computers geographically dispersed in areas nearest to the people who request the information. In another Internet caching scheme, a request for data goes to the main server, but the data is delivered from the server in the network that has the fastest, shortest connection to the requester. Internet caching improves performance for the user and reduces traffic over wired networks. However, known Internet caching methods do not reduce traffic for a wireless interface used to access a wide area network.
Therefore, a need exists for a method and apparatus that reduces wireless traffic for access to a network.